"I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield."
Interesting to see Conway's law show up here. Companies tend to ship their org structure in a product.
I think Conway's law is more interesting. It seems natural that networks of human relationships would mirror each other when the same groups of humans translate themselves into a new context.
Whereas the structure of technological products is a "different thing" than the human relationships that created it, it's less obvious that it would translate across that boundary.
Unless the technology is glued together with ad-hoc systems using email, slack, Dropbox, and the like. At least that’s my experience in small businesses.
I think it’s about software engineers, who are supposed to be impervious about effects of caste structures and hierarchy, judging programming languages from the caste lens.
That is my interpretation, please don’t hold me against it
"it is very hard to square the circle whereby coexisting in alliance with the Klingon Empire as we see it is the right and moral thing for the Federation to do."
You have to understand that the Klingons in TOS were a metaphor for the Soviets/Russians and TNG was reflecting the 1980s/1990s hope that democracy was taking root there and by working with them they would be Westernized.
It's also stated in enterprise that Klingons do have other castes, the warrior caste is just the most dominant. (Although the caste system doesn't seem strictly hereditary)
is it really that far fetched that instead of bikes, football, and basketball, klingon society decided to give all their kids batleths, so everyone grows up really into it?
One of my favorite dynamics: Warrior class that really kicks butt, takes control over the state and then slowly becomes obsolete but is so embedded in the social structure that it just sticks around sucking up vast resources for hundreds of years.
I've read the Ottoman Empire had this happen with the Janissaries, but there are lots of other instances of the military becoming a colossal useless but dangerous parasite, even lots of current-day ones.
I think Tokugawa-era samurai fits the description better. The Meiji era saw the samurai stripped of most of their stipends and privileges, and with little left but their pride they had to go find respectable jobs.
Sparta never really kicked butt, they just propagandized themselves as having done so in the past, even though their performance is pretty average compared to other city states (and very dependent on their tributaries and slaves, at that).
Then Sparta started believing their propaganda and setting up a huge warrior caste, which sucked up resources for decades without ever really accomplishing anything. Then Philip rocked up and annihilated the whole place, their much-vaunted warrior caste had no chance against the Macedonians.
Sparta was built on slavery, their obsession with war was necessary to keep their slaves in check and deal with constant uprisings, it was very practical for their way of life.
Its also because they built it entirely on slaves and refused citizenship to most. 300 was an entertaining movie but it left out the slavery that was central to Sparta.
70-85% of the spartan population were slaves. It takes a very brutal approach to keep things that way, so yes, 300 was rather not so much about the general concept of political freedom. Only about the freedom of one class to keep being slave masters and not also become subordinate to a new master on top.
Sparta and Rome suffered from the same problem, actually. They approached it differently. Rome survived. Sparta didn't.
The problem was that citizenship or social class was based on inheritance and it was essentially a closed system. At a time when infant mortality was so high and being in the military was risky, this meant that the ruling class diminished over time.
The author of this piece touches on how most soldiers had to bring their own gear. That's fair because they're talking about why people fight not how but it's important. So in Rome, you were cavalry if you could bring your own horse. Only the wealthier people could do this. This was a later reform. The very early Roman cavalry were a closed class. We don't know a lot about this other than legends because records were lost, most notably when Rome was sacked by the Gauls in 390 BCE.
Anyway, so "equites" were a higher social class but were a mix. Some of them were patricians (probably descended from the original heavy cavalry that protected the pre-Republic King, allegedly). Also, some patricians weren't equites.
In the early Republic there were 40-45 Patrician families. They held all the political power and offices. By Caesar's time it had dwindled to ~12, so much so that some plebeian families got elevated.
Sparta was what we'd now call an ethno-state requiring a full bloodline for citizenship. AFAIK Sparta never evolved away from that and all such closed societies die, just like the original Roman patrician families.
Rome took a different approach that bears some similarity to "whiteness" in the modern world. Race is an invented social construct (and, in the case of whiteness, was invented to justify slavery). But what has made whiteness resilient is that definition of who is white keeps evolving as necessary to maintain the in-groups.
For example, Ben Franklin didn't consider Germans "white" (famously describing them as "swarthy" [1]). Through different waves, different European ethnic groups became "white". The Irish didn't become "white" in the US until 100-150 years ago. Arabs became "white" in 1915 [2].
I just want to stress how made up this all is. Anyway, back to Rome.
Rome was famous for taking over an ethnic group (usually quite violently) but then making them Roman. Many people on the periphery of the empire aspired to become Roman. We have a term for it: Romanization
[1]: https://medium.com/@cailiansavage1/why-benjamin-franklin-did... (or Latinization). There's historical record of this everywhere from Eastern Europe to Northern Africa ro Britannia. Britannia was a funny one because there are Latin inscriptions describing a very Roman life from people who unsuccessfully rebelled against Rome in the early occupation a century earlier.
So I guess I'm saying is that yes, Sparta atrophied as all purity-based ethnicities always do whereas Rome survived much longer with an expanding concept of "Roman-ness", which isn't too dissimilar from what we recognize as "whiteness" today.
>For example, Ben Franklin didn't consider Germans "white" (famously describing them as "swarthy" [1]). Through different waves, different European ethnic groups became "white". The Irish didn't become "white" in the US until 100-150 years ago. Arabs became "white" in 1915 [2].
To be a bit pedantic, you're combining two different senses of 'white' there: in the US, being culturally considered white by others was distinct from being legally considered white by the government, because from the Naturalization Act of 1790 onward, naturalization was legally limited to "free white persons" (subject to some later modifications, though "free white person" remained a category). From a legal perspective, the Irish (and Germans) were always considered white, and there was never any question (if I recall correctly, for Mexicans, there was at some time advice that legal whiteness should actually be determined based directly on skin color). From a cultural perspective, views could of course be more varied, and there's the complexity that views and discrimination could certainly be based on factors other than seeing people as white or non-white, even at a racial level for the types of people who made distinctions within whiteness. And of course, cultural views remain varied: I've been around some very waspy wasps in the US who, knowing my Greek name, probably didn't consider me to be entirely white.
By the time of the case you cite, the legal question more broadly had become a mess of different and sometimes contradictory decisions, in part because, when it actually needed to be litigated, 'scientific racism' and 'common knowledge' could go in very different directions, as one might expect from something so arbitrary and contrived. Dow was decided on scientific racism lines, and made some Arabs white (particularly Syrians), though there were later cases with the opposite determination, in part because Dow was just Fourth Circuit, but also at times including arguments like 'from a place not bordering the Mediterranean'. Thind, on the other hand, was determined on common knowledge lines, and can bizarrely be summarized as 'being Aryan and very racist does not make a person white' (the entire set of pre-Thind cases around Indians, actually, often have wild and arbitrary decisions; I recall that one lower court decision could be summarized as 'this scientific argument seems dubious, but the guy seems like an upstanding character, so it seems fair to say he's white').
I live in a country that was ruled by the military many times in the past, and the US never looked to me under treat of a military coup.
In my country, any political problem real or perceived, and part of the population are already asking for the military to attempt a coup and fix things.
In the USA, there was never a need for a military coup. After the Spanish-American war, the MIC was so wealthy that they simply bought influence. A few million handed to influential politicians is far cheaper than a coup.
The USA has the best government that money can buy.
Yeah, ultimately it ends up being decided who the military is backing. Look at Spain, initially overtaken by a military coup. Then after Franco's death, as the transition to full blown democracy was already happening, sometime in the 80s (23-F), right as the successor to Suárez was about to take place, the military attempted another coup, but this time the military was on the people's democracy side, and basically saved democracy that day.
We had a coup attempt without military intervention on 1/6. The current regime is actively purging the military leadership.
Countries don’t have military coups or juntas because they are fundamentally bad or whatever. It happens becuase controls and civil authority is too weak, and we are in a cycle where the US is dismantling all controls and adopting a position of unlimited executive power. So it’s a matter of “when” some general intervenes. Either at the behest of someone or to save the republic.
You don’t really need a lot of people. Maybe a battalion or two.
I'm sorry, this is just sententious bloviation. The sources are so thin, there's no reason to go around imputing all these fantastical ideas that somehow benefit your own beliefs. It's just boring and insipid to watch people fall into this trap over and over.
This is a blog post (not a paper) written for a general audience by an academic summarizing content he has gone into greater detail on in his other blog posts which generally have more links to further reading - and this one also opens with suggestions of three or four books that provide a deeper overview of the topics it goes into.
It also doesn’t pretend to be anything other than the author’s opinion about how fantasy world builders might better incorporate real world historical analogues into their stories for greater verisimilitude – and, yes, to further Bret Devereux’s explicit agenda which is to counteract what he sees as historical misinformation perpetuated by fantasy authors adopting a sheen of ‘based in realistic history’ while actually doing a disservice to ancient and modern people and their histories.
Agreed, the article contained a lot of speculation and not many historical examples. It was more about what the author thought “made sense” than what reality was.
It was also quite long winded. Probably could have been summarized to maybe 3 reasons. Oddly enough I don’t see “money” mentioned, at least not simply, and that should probably be reason #1
> Oddly enough I don’t see “money” mentioned, at least not simply
"the entitlement principle (service as the flip-side of the coin for some set of rights or status)" and
the employment principle (separate from the vocational principle). We may sum it up with, “recruits show up purely as an economic transaction: service for money” – it’s a job.
Close enough.
> and that should probably be reason #1
Article goes on to explain that:
it is fairly rare for pre-modern armies to function purely ‘as a job.’
Which makes sense: humanity's history of picking fights with fellow humans goes back much further than the history of money itself. And even where they overlap, there's other reasons for recruits to enter an army.
Much of pre-modern societies were organised around master-servant, slavery, nobility, family clans & related concepts. Free market economies with individuals striving to maximize the amount of gold nuggets in their pouch, is a relatively recent concept.
I do think it's worth looking at a few of his other posts (I'm a fan) to lend some credence to this one speficially. The more history-focused (so not aimed at worldbuilders) pieces are consistently well-sourced in a way that most blogs aren't, and he has a pretty long history of this same level of care.
Does that make him infallible? Of course not. But it does mean I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here.
I guess it’s so long-winded you never made it to the four paragraph section, about 20 paragraphs and two subheadings in, about economic motivations for recruitment?
> The first place most modern folks’ mind goes, of course, is to pattern this task off of their own jobs and so to assume that these fellows are under arms because they are paid to be, which I am going to term the employment principle.
You're right about reason #1. And you've probably heard about strong contenders for #2 and #3.
There's a famous quote attributed to the Italian military commander Gian Giacomo Trivulzio in 1499.
When asked by King Louis XII of France what preparations were needed to invade the Duchy of Milan, Trivulzio responded: "To carry out war, three things are necessary: money, money, and yet more money."
"I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield."
Interesting to see Conway's law show up here. Companies tend to ship their org structure in a product.
I think Conway's law is more interesting. It seems natural that networks of human relationships would mirror each other when the same groups of humans translate themselves into a new context.
Whereas the structure of technological products is a "different thing" than the human relationships that created it, it's less obvious that it would translate across that boundary.
> “structure of technological products”
Unless the technology is glued together with ad-hoc systems using email, slack, Dropbox, and the like. At least that’s my experience in small businesses.
Reminds me of the whole "Python is for Brahmins" stuff at Microsoft India office.
Looks like it was a satire? I couldn’t find any authoritative sources on it.
https://www.m9.news/social-media-viral/viral-microsoft-caste...
What? Can you explain?
The was a lawsuit that they only allowed favoured castes to use Python.
I think it’s about software engineers, who are supposed to be impervious about effects of caste structures and hierarchy, judging programming languages from the caste lens.
That is my interpretation, please don’t hold me against it
The exact quote "python is for brahmins" brings up top links on incels.is and 4chan, so perhaps OC's character is something worth dismissing.
This is a bizarre reply? IIRC there was a law suit involved
That's how the story goes, yes.
It's satirical fiction. There was no lawsuit, just blogs saying there was.
https://www.m9.news/social-media-viral/viral-microsoft-caste...
"it is very hard to square the circle whereby coexisting in alliance with the Klingon Empire as we see it is the right and moral thing for the Federation to do."
You have to understand that the Klingons in TOS were a metaphor for the Soviets/Russians and TNG was reflecting the 1980s/1990s hope that democracy was taking root there and by working with them they would be Westernized.
It's also stated in enterprise that Klingons do have other castes, the warrior caste is just the most dominant. (Although the caste system doesn't seem strictly hereditary)
is it really that far fetched that instead of bikes, football, and basketball, klingon society decided to give all their kids batleths, so everyone grows up really into it?
That sort of happened in a brief period in mediaeval England when they gave everyone longbows.
Japanese militarism was a thing recently, so the kids got eveything but the batleth.
One of my favorite dynamics: Warrior class that really kicks butt, takes control over the state and then slowly becomes obsolete but is so embedded in the social structure that it just sticks around sucking up vast resources for hundreds of years.
I've read the Ottoman Empire had this happen with the Janissaries, but there are lots of other instances of the military becoming a colossal useless but dangerous parasite, even lots of current-day ones.
IIRC, the samurai class after Meiji reform period kinda fall into this category, they eventually emerge into Yakuza.
I think Tokugawa-era samurai fits the description better. The Meiji era saw the samurai stripped of most of their stipends and privileges, and with little left but their pride they had to go find respectable jobs.
Sparta, their entire civilization basically atrophied because of it.
Sparta never really kicked butt, they just propagandized themselves as having done so in the past, even though their performance is pretty average compared to other city states (and very dependent on their tributaries and slaves, at that).
Then Sparta started believing their propaganda and setting up a huge warrior caste, which sucked up resources for decades without ever really accomplishing anything. Then Philip rocked up and annihilated the whole place, their much-vaunted warrior caste had no chance against the Macedonians.
And fittingly enough, a good description of what Sparta was actually like and the myth of their warrior prowess is the same blog series as the original post: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
Sparta was built on slavery, their obsession with war was necessary to keep their slaves in check and deal with constant uprisings, it was very practical for their way of life.
No, it was because of the low fertility rate. Most powerful class in Sparta were rich widows, even kings had to borrow money from them.
Its also because they built it entirely on slaves and refused citizenship to most. 300 was an entertaining movie but it left out the slavery that was central to Sparta.
70-85% of the spartan population were slaves. It takes a very brutal approach to keep things that way, so yes, 300 was rather not so much about the general concept of political freedom. Only about the freedom of one class to keep being slave masters and not also become subordinate to a new master on top.
Sparta and Rome suffered from the same problem, actually. They approached it differently. Rome survived. Sparta didn't.
The problem was that citizenship or social class was based on inheritance and it was essentially a closed system. At a time when infant mortality was so high and being in the military was risky, this meant that the ruling class diminished over time.
The author of this piece touches on how most soldiers had to bring their own gear. That's fair because they're talking about why people fight not how but it's important. So in Rome, you were cavalry if you could bring your own horse. Only the wealthier people could do this. This was a later reform. The very early Roman cavalry were a closed class. We don't know a lot about this other than legends because records were lost, most notably when Rome was sacked by the Gauls in 390 BCE.
Anyway, so "equites" were a higher social class but were a mix. Some of them were patricians (probably descended from the original heavy cavalry that protected the pre-Republic King, allegedly). Also, some patricians weren't equites.
In the early Republic there were 40-45 Patrician families. They held all the political power and offices. By Caesar's time it had dwindled to ~12, so much so that some plebeian families got elevated.
Sparta was what we'd now call an ethno-state requiring a full bloodline for citizenship. AFAIK Sparta never evolved away from that and all such closed societies die, just like the original Roman patrician families.
Rome took a different approach that bears some similarity to "whiteness" in the modern world. Race is an invented social construct (and, in the case of whiteness, was invented to justify slavery). But what has made whiteness resilient is that definition of who is white keeps evolving as necessary to maintain the in-groups.
For example, Ben Franklin didn't consider Germans "white" (famously describing them as "swarthy" [1]). Through different waves, different European ethnic groups became "white". The Irish didn't become "white" in the US until 100-150 years ago. Arabs became "white" in 1915 [2].
I just want to stress how made up this all is. Anyway, back to Rome.
Rome was famous for taking over an ethnic group (usually quite violently) but then making them Roman. Many people on the periphery of the empire aspired to become Roman. We have a term for it: Romanization
[1]: https://medium.com/@cailiansavage1/why-benjamin-franklin-did... (or Latinization). There's historical record of this everywhere from Eastern Europe to Northern Africa ro Britannia. Britannia was a funny one because there are Latin inscriptions describing a very Roman life from people who unsuccessfully rebelled against Rome in the early occupation a century earlier.
So I guess I'm saying is that yes, Sparta atrophied as all purity-based ethnicities always do whereas Rome survived much longer with an expanding concept of "Roman-ness", which isn't too dissimilar from what we recognize as "whiteness" today.
[2]: https://teachinglegalhistory.unl.edu/s/oer/item/1999
>For example, Ben Franklin didn't consider Germans "white" (famously describing them as "swarthy" [1]). Through different waves, different European ethnic groups became "white". The Irish didn't become "white" in the US until 100-150 years ago. Arabs became "white" in 1915 [2].
To be a bit pedantic, you're combining two different senses of 'white' there: in the US, being culturally considered white by others was distinct from being legally considered white by the government, because from the Naturalization Act of 1790 onward, naturalization was legally limited to "free white persons" (subject to some later modifications, though "free white person" remained a category). From a legal perspective, the Irish (and Germans) were always considered white, and there was never any question (if I recall correctly, for Mexicans, there was at some time advice that legal whiteness should actually be determined based directly on skin color). From a cultural perspective, views could of course be more varied, and there's the complexity that views and discrimination could certainly be based on factors other than seeing people as white or non-white, even at a racial level for the types of people who made distinctions within whiteness. And of course, cultural views remain varied: I've been around some very waspy wasps in the US who, knowing my Greek name, probably didn't consider me to be entirely white.
By the time of the case you cite, the legal question more broadly had become a mess of different and sometimes contradictory decisions, in part because, when it actually needed to be litigated, 'scientific racism' and 'common knowledge' could go in very different directions, as one might expect from something so arbitrary and contrived. Dow was decided on scientific racism lines, and made some Arabs white (particularly Syrians), though there were later cases with the opposite determination, in part because Dow was just Fourth Circuit, but also at times including arguments like 'from a place not bordering the Mediterranean'. Thind, on the other hand, was determined on common knowledge lines, and can bizarrely be summarized as 'being Aryan and very racist does not make a person white' (the entire set of pre-Thind cases around Indians, actually, often have wild and arbitrary decisions; I recall that one lower court decision could be summarized as 'this scientific argument seems dubious, but the guy seems like an upstanding character, so it seems fair to say he's white').
Sounds like current US. Military industrial complex just starts wars randomly, and does not bother with approval from senate.
I live in a country that was ruled by the military many times in the past, and the US never looked to me under treat of a military coup.
In my country, any political problem real or perceived, and part of the population are already asking for the military to attempt a coup and fix things.
In the USA, there was never a need for a military coup. After the Spanish-American war, the MIC was so wealthy that they simply bought influence. A few million handed to influential politicians is far cheaper than a coup.
The USA has the best government that money can buy.
Yeah, ultimately it ends up being decided who the military is backing. Look at Spain, initially overtaken by a military coup. Then after Franco's death, as the transition to full blown democracy was already happening, sometime in the 80s (23-F), right as the successor to Suárez was about to take place, the military attempted another coup, but this time the military was on the people's democracy side, and basically saved democracy that day.
Really a hit or miss concept, military coups.
We had a coup attempt without military intervention on 1/6. The current regime is actively purging the military leadership.
Countries don’t have military coups or juntas because they are fundamentally bad or whatever. It happens becuase controls and civil authority is too weak, and we are in a cycle where the US is dismantling all controls and adopting a position of unlimited executive power. So it’s a matter of “when” some general intervenes. Either at the behest of someone or to save the republic.
You don’t really need a lot of people. Maybe a battalion or two.
See any military junta or dictatorship.
Another great post by one of the nations best public intellectuals.
I'm sorry, this is just sententious bloviation. The sources are so thin, there's no reason to go around imputing all these fantastical ideas that somehow benefit your own beliefs. It's just boring and insipid to watch people fall into this trap over and over.
This is a blog post (not a paper) written for a general audience by an academic summarizing content he has gone into greater detail on in his other blog posts which generally have more links to further reading - and this one also opens with suggestions of three or four books that provide a deeper overview of the topics it goes into.
It also doesn’t pretend to be anything other than the author’s opinion about how fantasy world builders might better incorporate real world historical analogues into their stories for greater verisimilitude – and, yes, to further Bret Devereux’s explicit agenda which is to counteract what he sees as historical misinformation perpetuated by fantasy authors adopting a sheen of ‘based in realistic history’ while actually doing a disservice to ancient and modern people and their histories.
Agreed, the article contained a lot of speculation and not many historical examples. It was more about what the author thought “made sense” than what reality was.
It was also quite long winded. Probably could have been summarized to maybe 3 reasons. Oddly enough I don’t see “money” mentioned, at least not simply, and that should probably be reason #1
> Oddly enough I don’t see “money” mentioned, at least not simply
"the entitlement principle (service as the flip-side of the coin for some set of rights or status)" and
the employment principle (separate from the vocational principle). We may sum it up with, “recruits show up purely as an economic transaction: service for money” – it’s a job.
Close enough.
> and that should probably be reason #1
Article goes on to explain that:
it is fairly rare for pre-modern armies to function purely ‘as a job.’
Which makes sense: humanity's history of picking fights with fellow humans goes back much further than the history of money itself. And even where they overlap, there's other reasons for recruits to enter an army.
Much of pre-modern societies were organised around master-servant, slavery, nobility, family clans & related concepts. Free market economies with individuals striving to maximize the amount of gold nuggets in their pouch, is a relatively recent concept.
I do think it's worth looking at a few of his other posts (I'm a fan) to lend some credence to this one speficially. The more history-focused (so not aimed at worldbuilders) pieces are consistently well-sourced in a way that most blogs aren't, and he has a pretty long history of this same level of care.
Does that make him infallible? Of course not. But it does mean I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here.
I guess it’s so long-winded you never made it to the four paragraph section, about 20 paragraphs and two subheadings in, about economic motivations for recruitment?
> The first place most modern folks’ mind goes, of course, is to pattern this task off of their own jobs and so to assume that these fellows are under arms because they are paid to be, which I am going to term the employment principle.
Why would "money" be necessary?
https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...
You're right about reason #1. And you've probably heard about strong contenders for #2 and #3.
There's a famous quote attributed to the Italian military commander Gian Giacomo Trivulzio in 1499.
When asked by King Louis XII of France what preparations were needed to invade the Duchy of Milan, Trivulzio responded: "To carry out war, three things are necessary: money, money, and yet more money."
If you think its quite long winded taken note it's title includes PART 1
Oh you haven't seen the four-part series on iron (https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...) that ended up with parts (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum).
The Helm's Deep series ended up with 8 posts. Well worth reading.